SolveSpace

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with SolveSpace, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

UI is obtuse, especially to use with a trackpad2026-06-19
Hard to use on a trackpad; needs a 3-button mouse; web version unusable on phone2026-06-19
Zoom and pan behaviour is not intuitive; axes stay fixed on screen when zooming2026-03-31
Modal dialogs pop up awkwardly when a constraint is deleted or can't be met2026-03-31
Modal 'can not create constraint' dialogs interrupt the workflow2025-12-13
Error messages are not helpful enough, and the author hopes they will improve2024-05-21
SolveSpace is a pain to use, though the commenter can use it2024-05-01
Not the easiest to use; bare bones, and certain actions can leave it in a bad state2023-07-01
GTK modal dialogs pop up unexpectedly and break the user's workflow2023-04-20
Almost every operation stalls for many seconds on large models2022-05-22
Picking lines, points and faces with mouse clicks is unreliable and inconsistent2022-05-22
Couldn't figure out how to stack 10 copies without breaking the solver2020-12-10
Becomes unusably slow with complicated models, redraws taking half an hour2019-10-04
Certain tasks like fillets, chamfers and changing colour are oddly difficult and complex2017-06-04
The UI is rough, though the commenter says it is still powerful2016-10-06